NER,
AND LAWRENCE.

BY WILL H. LOW.

At the period when in France David and his followers had resuscitated
a dead and gone art, and by dint of governmental patronage had infused
into it a semblance of life, across the Channel, in a provincial town
of England, a little group of painters were quietly doing work which,
if it did not in itself change the face of modern art, was at least
indicative of the change soon to be accomplished by the advent of
Constable.

The leader of this group, which has been of late years in the hands
of zealous amateurs and dealers elevated to the rank of "school," was
John Crome, born at Norwich, December 22, 1768. The son of a publican,
he was first an errand boy to a local physician and afterwards
apprenticed to a sign painter. Without instruction, hampered by
an early marriage, he forsook his occupation, and sought to paint
landscapes; meanwhile finding in the houses of the neighboring gentry
pupils in drawing. The lessons gave him a living; and in the houses
where he taught were many Dutch pictures which he carefully studied,
so that he is in a sense a follower of the Holland school. But his
greatest and best teacher was the quiet Norfolk country; and the
environs of Norwich, from which he seldom strayed, found in him an
earnest student.

[Illustration: GEORGE ROMNEY, PAINTER OF "THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER,"
SHOWN ON PAGE 257. FROM A MEDALLION BY THOMAS HALEY.]

In 1805, in conjunction with his son (the younger Crome) and Cotman,
Stark, and Vincent, Crome founded at Norwich an artists' club, where
the members exhibited their pictures and had a large studio in common.
Some of the members of the Norwich "school," a title to which none of
them in their own time pretended, left their native town, and went to
London; but its founder remained true to the city of his birth, where
he died April 22, 1821. Late in life he visited Paris, where the
Louvre still held the treasures of Europe, garnered after every
campaign by Napoleon; and his enthusiasm for the great Dutch painters
found fresh nourishment.

It is by this link in the great chain of art that Crome gained his
first consideration in the world's esteem; but more important to us of
to-day is the fact that he was the first of his century to return to
nature. No evil that the frivolous eighteenth century had wrought,
or that the classicism of the early years of the nineteenth had
perpetuated in art, was so great as the substitution of a c